# Beautiful Shining People **A damaged teenage tech prodigy meets an enigmatic waitress in a tiny Tokyo café, sparking an epic journey across Japan that will change everything, forever ... a captivating, masterful novel with an extraordinary mystery at its heart...** ''Set against a tech heavy backdrop _Beautiful Shining People_ blooms into an emotional and soulful tale that reckons with the isolation we can all feel as outsiders'' **_SciFi Now_ Book of the Month** ''That _Beautiful Shining People_ isn''t just a slipstream novel with pretensions to being literature is in great part down to the deftness and tenderness with which Grothaus draws his central relationship ... to let us explore a world of robots and deepfakes that''s just unfamiliar enough to be exotic'' **_SFX Magazine_ Book of the Month** ''A fascinating exploration of what it means to be human in a world where everything can be faked ... wonderful, insightful and thoughtful'' **James Oswald** \------------- **This world is anything but ordinary, and it''s about to change forever...** It''s our world, but decades into the future... An ordinary world, where cars drive themselves, drones glide across the sky, and robots work in burger shops. There are two superpowers and a digital Cold War, but all conflicts are safely oceans away. People get up, work, and have dinner. Everything is as it should be... Except for seventeen-year-old John, a tech prodigy from a damaged family, who hides a deeply personal secret. But everything starts to change for him when he enters a tiny café on a cold Tokyo night. A café run by a disgraced sumo wrestler, where a peculiar dog with a spherical head lives, alongside its owner, enigmatic waitress Neotnia... But Neotnia hides a secret of her own - a secret that will turn John''s unhappy life upside down. A secret that will take them from the neon streets of Tokyo to Hiroshima''s tragic past to the snowy mountains of Nagano. A secret that reveals that this world is anything ordinary - and it''s about to change forever... \------------- ''Poetically written, every word of this adventure leaps off the page with passion. A wonderful and enlightening trip'' **_The Sun_** ''Cyberpunk meets _bildungsroman_ - a real joy'' **Oscar de Muriel** ''Exquisite world-building, this book had me invested from the very first page. Vivid plot and irresistible characters and a real tug at the soul ... you''ll drown in it'' **Lisa Bradley** ''A life-affirming, epic book about what it is to be human: to live, to dream, to hope, to love ... at a time when we most need reminding of these things'' **David F Ross** ''Totally engrossing from the start - the story, characters and settings will linger in your imagination long after you''re finished ... truly wonderful'' **Jonathan Whitelaw** ''Masterful ... truly breathtaking and achingly beautiful. It builds anticipation and suspense before coming together in a thrilling, captivating conclusion'' **_The Bookbag_** ''Outstanding! Sci-fi showing how the past might impact on the future ... a glimpse into a (very plausible) terrifying future'' **Michael J Malone What readers are saying...** **\*\*\*\*\*** ''A beautiful, emotional and thought-provoking read'' ''A striking and strange novel - and a searing statement about the dangerously thin lines between utopia and dystopia'' ''Just devastatingly beautiful'' ''My book of the year ... no question'' ''Masterful storytelling'' ''Grothaus has a bewitching ability to stop time in a moment, and then run seemlessly into action with unstoppable momentum'' ''Succinctly captured the feeling of Japanese fiction. I was very much put in mind of Haruki Murakami or Toshikazu Kawaguchi'' ## Details - **Price:** 0.0 GBP - **Vendor:** Orenda Books - **Type:** Michael Grothaus ## Variants | Variant | Price | Available | |---------|-------|-----------| | Default Title | 0.00 GBP | In stock | ## Images - Beautiful Shining People --- > Source: [Somiibooks](https://somiibooks.com/products/beautiful-shining-people) > Updated: 2026-09-08